ICTP will hold a workshop on the hazards tsunamis pose to nuclear facilities within coastal areas. The workshop, cosponsored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), will take place on 8-12 May in the Lundqvist Lecture Hall located in the Adriatico Guesthouse. Among the topics to be discussed are the status of the UNESCO/IOC tsunami warning system, the efficacy of building codes and regulations, and strategies for improving standards to mitigate the risks posed by tsunamis.

The ICTP Scientific Council will hold its annual meeting on 11-12 May. This will mark the first Scientific Council in which Italy’s internationally renowned physicist Nicola Cabibbo, University of Rome “La Sapienza”, will preside as chairperson. José Antonio de la Peña, an eminent professor of mathematics from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, will attend the meeting as the most recently appointed member. The Council will review ICTP’s performance over the past year and discuss possible future activities.

Gregorio Medrano Asensio, Adviser in charge of Developing Countries at the Directorate General for Research of the European Commission, will visit ICTP to meet with ICTP and TWAS officials to explore opportunities for cooperation between the EC and Trieste’s scientific community. He will also give a talk on the Seventh Framework Programme (2007-2013) of the European Commission on Thursday 11 May, at 10.00 a.m., Lecture Room C, ICTP Main Building.

Xiahohua Zhu, professor, Peking University School of Mathematical Sciences, will be officially awarded the ICTP Prize 2005 in the Main Lecture Hall on 16 May. The ceremony will begin at 11:00 with opening remarks by ICTP director, K.R. Sreenivasan, followed by a lecture by Zhu titled “Canonical Metrics in Kähler Geometry". The ICTP Prize 2005 will be awarded in honour Armand Borel, a long-time professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton who lectured at ICTP.

Dong Jinyi, China’s Ambassador to Italy, visited ICTP on 12 May to speak with director K.R. Sreenivasan and to tour the Centre’s faciltiies. Dong also met with Mohamed H.A. Hassan, executive director of TWAS (The Academy of Sciences for the Developing World).

Ambassador Dong Jinyi signs guestbook

Julian Chela-Flores, ICTP staff associate, will speak on the “Evolution of the Universe: From Astrophysics to Astrobiology” at a conference sponsored by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome. The conference, “The Origins: How, When and Where It All Started", will take place on 22 May. Among the conference speakers will be frequent ICTP visitors Gabriele Veneziano, CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, Geneva, Switzerland; Antonio Lazcano, National University of Mexico; and George Coyne SJ, Specola Vaticana, Vatican City.

Roy J. Glauber, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2005 “for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence", will visit Trieste from Tuesday 23 to Friday 26 May. On Wednesday 24 May, Glauber will present a public lecture, “One Hundred Years of Light Quanta", at 15.30 at the University of Trieste, Building H3 Lecture Room. On Friday 26 May, he will give a technical lecture, “Quantum Optics and Heavy Ion Physics", at the closing session of the Conference on Perspectives in Hadronic Physics, in the ICTP Main Lecture Hall at 15.30.

The next in a series of public lectures—cosponsored by ICTP, the University of Trieste’s Department of Mathematics and Informatics and Immaginario Scientifico—will take place on Thursday, 25 May at 17:30 when Michele Emmer, professor of mathematics, “La Sapienza” University, Rome, speaks on “Geometry and Soap Bubbles.” The lecture, in Italian, will take place in the Trieste University’s H2-bis Building, Morin 2A Lecture Room. Michele Emmer is an internationally known scientist and scholar who has explored the intricate interface between science, culture and psychology.

Francis K.A. Allotey, a former pro-vice chancellor of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana, and member of the ICTP Scientific Council since 1996, has been honoured by his native country by having his image placed on a postage stamp. The official ceremony honouring Allotey took place on 29 March during Ghana’s nation-wide celebration of the total eclipse of the sun. Allotey, an internationally renowned physicist and mathematician, is one of Africa’s most eminent scientists.

F.K.A. Allotey shows stamp at ICTP Scientific Council, 11 May

Three members of ICTP Scientific Council are among the six Foreign Members recently elected to the Royal Society for 2006. They are: Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow (ICTP Scientific Council Member 2002-2005), Edouard Brézin (ICTP Scientific Council Member 1996-2003) and Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen (ICTP Scientific Council since 2004).
Other eminent scientists also earning membership in the Royal Society include the following speakers at ICTP activities: Stephen Barnett, University of Strathclyde; Charles Thomas Bayley Foxon, University of Nottingham; Karl John Friston, University College London; Mriganka Sur, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA; Peter Christopher West, King’s College London; and David Phillip Woodruff, University of Warwick. For the complete roster of members in the Royal Society, one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious science academies, see www.royalsoc.ac.uk.

A Portuguese version of One Hundred Reasons To Be A Scientist, Algumas razões para ser um cientista, has been published by Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas (CBPF). Ricardo Galvão, CBPF Director and winner of the ICTP Prize in 1984, has written an introduction to the book. One Hundred Reasons To Be A Scientist, a compilation of personal accounts by eminent scientists from around the world assembled by ICTP Director K.R. Sreenivasan, was first published in 2004. Both books are on display at the ICTP Library.

Yu Lu, former head of the ICTP Condensed Matter Physics Section and now director of the Interdisciplinary Center of Theoretical Studies (ICTS) in Beijing, China, and Riazzudin, director of the National Centre for Physics (NCP) at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad. Pakistan, and frequent participant in ICTP activities, have been officially inducted as Fellows of the American Physical Society. The award ceremony took place at the annual meeting of APS in Baltimore in March. Yu Lu was honoured “For his important and long time contributions to a wide range of topics in condensed matter theory and for his significant role in fostering international collaboration in physics.” Riazuddin was honoured “For original and outstanding contributions to theory and phenomenology of strong and eletroweak interactions, especially where an interplay of such interactions is involved and for internationalization of physics in developing countries.”

“Science is art” is the title of the Science Café that will be held today, 13 June, at 6 pm, at Caffè San Marco (via Cesare Battisti 18, Trieste). Claudio Tuniz, ICTP Assistant Director, and Gianrossano Giannini, professor of physics at the University of Trieste, will discuss how physicists and acheologists are now working together to improve our understanding of the past, and to solve many historical mysteries. Music and readings will enrich the event.

The UNESCO Science Report 2005 is now available online. Mohamed H.A. Hassan, Executive Director of TWAS (The Academy of Sciences for the Developing World), served as a coauthor, and Daniel Schaffer, Public Information Officer for ICTP/TWAS, as a contributing author for the chapter on Africa. Other authors, who are closely associated with ICTP, include: Adnan Badran, former Deputy Director General of UNESCO and former Prime Minister of Jordan, who authored the chapter on the Arab States; and Ana María Cetto, IAEA Deputy Director General and Head of Department of Technical Cooperation, and a frequent visitor to ICTP, who coauthored the chapter on Latin America.

Sandro Scandolo, ICTP staff member in the Condensed Matter Physics Group, has co-authored a paper titled “Amorphous silica-like carbon dioxide” in the 15 June edition of Nature. The paper focuses on a new kind of glass in which silicon atoms have been replaced by carbon atoms. The material, named “carbonia", was created by scientists from LENS (European Laboratory for Non-linear Spectroscopy) and INFM in Florence heating solid carbon dioxide at pressures of 500,000 times greater than atmospheric pressure. Scandolo’s theoretical contribution was to provide a microscopic model for the local arrangement of atoms in carbonia. Current collaborative efforts between LENS and ICTP are seeking to stabilize carbonia at ambient conditions, which could lead to the application of carbonia as a ultra-hard glass and as a coating for microelectronic devices.
ICTP Director Katepalli R.Sreenivasan and two scientists from the University of Maryland and Yale University published a brief communication on “Superfluid helium: Visualization of quantized vortices” in the 1 June issue of Nature. The paper describes the behaviour of liquid helium when cooled below its phase transition at 2.172 Kelvin, and the formation of peculiar vortices.